Culture Shifts Require Ritual: The Importance of Building Trust

When business leaders hear that “trust is important,” few disagree. That’s quite an easy statement – sure, makes sense, trust is important. One might think that this means leaders need to trust their employees to do their jobs well (to not display doubt by doing something like micromanaging). Or, one might think that an employee’s trust in a company is essential – that they’ll get compensated, that there’s no Enron on the horizon, or that they’ll be given the tools they need to succeed. 

But, and this is a major driver of climbing turnover rates in recent years, the understanding often stops there. There is rarely action taken based on the understanding that, indeed, trust is important. 

So if it’s that important, at the bare minimum, we should be asking ourselves how we display or build trust within our teams. Yet, after being mentioned at an annual retreat for the leadership team, it gets buried and forgotten – and that’s because, as important as we may agree it is, the status quo is that trust is immeasurable. 

And how is anyone supposed to take action, and be incentivized, to look deeper at trust when we can’t measure the impact? Luckily, some major researchers have gotten us some data that at least confirms the importance: 

Out of 50K people surveyed on if they trusted their teammates, their team leader, and their senior leaders: 

• Those who strongly agreed that they trusted people in two out of the three categories were 3X as likely as others to be fully engaged and highly resilient at work (essential to productivity and avoiding burnout). 
• Those who strongly agreed that they trusted people in all three categories were 15X as likely to be fully engaged, and 42X as likely to be highly resilient. 

So what action can we take now that we have some proof that trust is important in business?

A proven building block of trust is the act of frequent check-ins between employee and team leader. Team leaders who check in weekly: 

• Drive engagement scores up 77% 
• Drive voluntary turnover down 67% 

Why weekly? Building trust is not a simple activity, but a shift in company culture. And like any type of culture across time and space, it is made up of people and their rituals.

By making these check-ins a core ritual, leaders of teams can confirm they’re doing what they need to be doing in order to build trust, raise productivity, encourage communication, increase loyalty, and more. 

What should the check-in cover? 

• Constructive feedback (in both directions) 
• Praise 
• Discovering what the employee liked and disliked about the past week 
• Discovering what the employee hopes for the coming week 
• Convening on priorities
• Asking how you (the leader) can help them reach those goals

So now, only one variable remains. 

If we agree that trust is important, and that it’s essential to a successful team and business, and you know how you can start building it week by week… We just need to measure how well it works for your team and your business specifically – plus how any changes affect other parts of the business, like finances, operations, happiness, etc. 

ADPRI can and should continue to publish about the importance of building trust, but what leaders need are numbers — hard data about their teams — that show the culture shift and how it benefits business across the board. 

Good thing that’s what we do. 

Even when a generation of businesses can agree on something like “trust is important,” it’s clear that it’s difficult to then take action, and take action the right way. It’s not easy for teams (leadership or otherwise) to pitch allocation of time and resources to something that is believed to be immeasurable. That’s why we specialize in putting data on the ambiguous, because what you can measure, you can improve. That’s why we built the tool you need to make previously intangible issues clear and apparent. (That reason, plus we have a relentless desire to make the world full of Happy Productive Humans.) 

Learn more here, or look at some trust-building data here. It’s what we do best.